I approached Ashley Lande’s The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever with more curiosity than anything. A pre-existing deep spiritual sensitivity and a really bad experience with a marijuana high in my early twenties meant that I’d never had any desire to experiment with psychedelics—not even in my neo-Pagan days when I was drawn to many of the aesthetic and spiritual accoutrement of the mind-altering drug culture.
I have had a fair number of friends and acquaintances who would use LSD or mushrooms on a semi-regular basis. Despite their explanations, I could not understand the draw. After listening to Ashley speak about her experiences on a few podcasts, I wondered if her fuller story as presented in this book might help me understand a bit better. Hence, I approached the book with curiosity. I was subsequently surprised to find both a mirror, and a roadmap for how to interact with my own past.
I think many people of a certain age can relate to Ashley’s early story of a VBS-style introduction to God—earnest, even sweet, but ultimately incomplete. Her story begins with a need, and a proffered answer that doesn’t seem to fill it. The deeply artistic types will also recognize that extra dimension that she describes. Soft platitudes and abstraction were not enough to fill the sharp corners and need for something both beautiful and relevant.
Ashley followed in the footsteps of other tortured and skeptical artists. Dissatisfied with God, she explores atheism. Dissatisfied with that and still seeking transcendence, she finds her way to psychedelics. She describes her first trip as the discovery of a first gilded stair, the first teasing glance for all the answers that she needed. The bulk of the memoir relates to her repeated return to this little god that repeatedly under-delivers on its promise. It not only under-delivers, but repeatedly betrays, terrorizes, and makes demands upon her. The little god is a little tyrant, one that brings many friends.
It would have been so easy for Ashley to gloss over this section of the memoir. “I kept trying, and it kept getting worse. You get the picture.” It would have been easier to sum up years of vulnerability and foolishness with a few phrases and so keep a reader at arm’s length. It would also be easy to try to be truthful, and then create a reading experience that is both repetitive and frustrating, leaving a reader urging the narrator to get on with it and learn the lessons (as if a human life is a tightly paced, three-act-structured plot). Ashley, however, doesn’t shy away from the details, and she remembers this part of her life gently. This kinder approach, this understanding of her younger self and what she was searching for, opened that door in which I found the mirror. Once I understood what she was looking for, and why her little gods were so effective in their traps, I could understand my own past searches and wrong turnings.
As a teenager, I, too, grew dissatisfied with a well-meaning but incomplete portrayal of God. I, too, left the church, and then the faith to search for truth and consolation. As an artist, I found the promise of these things in ancient stories and mythologies and art. Where she thought she found The Thing in the freedom of chaos and no-limitations, I thought I found it in the strict order and perfection needed to make great art. Where Ashley’s god looked a lot like Pan, mine looked a lot like Apollo. In popular imagination, Apollo might have a much more wholesome and cleaned up reputation; however, as a god, he is just as incapable of fulfilling his promises. He takes just as much from his followers. He is just as difficult to break away from. Every time Ashley made a return to drugs with assurances that this time was different, I was reminded of my own microscopic shifts and self-delusions. My own grandiosity and goldenness, my own belief in my sense of control, was just as tempting and just as destructive.
As I read and found so many of these elements of my own story reflected, Ashley’s gentleness with her remembering helped me to look back on my own self-destructive wandering with more compassion. Like Ashley, I eventually returned to Christ, the only place where The Thing can be found. However, she showed how to occupy this state of grace with a sense of gratitude rather than of superiority. She shows love and kindness to the younger Ashley, even when recounting decisions that would cause deep harm to herself or those she loved. She finds the beginning threads of great blessings, such as meeting her husband or having her children, and rejoices over them, even though the fruition of those blessings are slow to appear. As she recalled, there was a sense of excitement for what she would eventually find. It was as if she were encouraging her younger, foolish self forward to growth. If I could take this gentle approach to my own past, how much more patient might I be with my future? Might I even be better to the people around me who are still searching?
Before ending this review, I want to take a moment to also recognize the technical skill and style that Ashley brings in her memoir. Ashley is an artist, and she knows well that how a story is presented is just as critical as the story itself. Her prose is simply beautiful, a pleasure to read even when relating an ugly memory. She ably describes the trips, painting the beautiful landscapes that kept drawing her back, and the horrors that followed when they went bad. Vivid adjectives and adverbs helped me see spaces I’ve never experienced. She folds into these the psychology and philosophy that morphs and changes as her life progresses. She worked in quotes from figures that influenced her, which also became sign markers of her philosophical and theological progress, people from Chris Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, to Ram Dass and Alan Watts, to Christ Himself and the people in her own life. While she relates the years of kaleidoscopic confusion, she provides waypoints to keep the reader grounded: “This is where we are, and this is where we’re going.”
Image Credit: Spinello Aretino, “The Conversion of Saint Paul” (c. 1391-92) via Wikimedia Commons
